


Dawn

by hubblegleeflower



Series: Favourite Ficlets [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Hidden Relationship, M/M, Victorian Holmes, Victorian Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 13:52:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6660835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hubblegleeflower/pseuds/hubblegleeflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Watson in the morning light, through the eyes of Holmes, who loves him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dawn

Watson is awake. Holmes can feel him stirring, feel his solid bulk stretch and turn in the bed next to him. Holmes holds very still. Watson will not know he is awake.

Watson does not always stay the night. The bed - though wider than Watson’s bunk in the other room - is not large, and the risk of discovery - with Mrs. Hudson and importunate clients turning up at all hours - is ever-present. Still, neither of them is particularly averse to risk, and spending the night with limbs entwined, waking to Presence after so many years of Absence is…most gratifying. So sometimes he stays.

Now, though, Watson is restless, and rolls himself out of the bed. The grey light of the misty morning filters through the net curtains of the window and onto Watson’s skin as he slips on his discarded trousers from the night before, pulling the braces over his bare shoulders. He straightens, and Holmes watches the play of muscles in the small of his back.

It is easy to forget, when Watson is cinched into his tweeds, bolstered and stayed in the well-fitted confines of waistcoat and collar, jacket and tie, that his chest has its own well-muscled depth, and that the tautness of his abdomen has little to do with his tailor’s clever handiwork. 

There he stands, though, unwrapped and unbanded, his body as firm and upright as when he is fully clothed, for all that only the stretch of his braces interrupts the expanse of his golden skin.

Over at the washstand, Watson fills the basin and washes his face with his cupped hands, droplets of water catching in his disheveled moustache and dripping down his torso. He does his best to pat his whiskers into place using only the water and the remains of yesterday’s wax. The effect when he has finished is tidy, if a little rough.

Holmes looks his fill. Watson, doctor and gentleman, looks like a labourer there, in braces and rumpled trousers, with his bristling moustache, the round muscles of his bare chest scattered with light curls of hair, strong and sturdy, rough and ready. _Magnificent._

Soon they will tuck and button themselves into shirts and waistcoats and layers of expectations and personae, and this bare-chested Watson in his braces whose soft skin is for Holmes’ gaze to linger upon will vanish like the morning mist.

This, here, is only a fragment, only the barest sliver of a moment. Golden skin rendered silver in the dawn light, ripple of muscle and play of shadow, the glittering path of a single drop of water down a brawny throat to a tangle of hair, where it vanishes. 


End file.
